


make the planets quake

by Thealmostrhetoricalquestion



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Thorne & Rowling
Genre: Crushes, First Kiss, Fluff, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-03 01:14:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15808335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thealmostrhetoricalquestion/pseuds/Thealmostrhetoricalquestion
Summary: “You’re thinking unkind things about yourself again,” Scorpius says. “Your face gets all crinkled up when you do.”Scorpius’s thumb shifts, tracking a path down Albus’s face, smoothing a groove into his skin that he hopes will be worn into place over time.“I wish you wouldn’t, you know,” Scorpius says, soft. “I quite like you un-crinkled.”





	make the planets quake

**Author's Note:**

> This is such a lovely fest idea, and I think I’ll probably have more stories to add. This is just a little one. I hope you like it! <3

It is bright and it blisters, the universe around them. There are stars and a hint of the moon, and everything shivers like a wave of shimmering desert heat. It's not a place where people should be, but it’s not the first time they’ve gone where they shouldn’t. They seem to find their way into all sorts of dark, dangerous places, safe in the knowledge that it’s okay as long as they’re together. 

Albus finds Scorpius easily in the dark - although it isn’t darkness, not really. It’s only dark if you look too deeply, if your eyes fix on the points between bright, burning stars, where the blue turns to black. Albus doesn’t look. He finds Scorpius instead, picking him out easily amongst it all, and he takes the hem of Scorpius’s sleeve in his hand. It wouldn’t do to get lost in a place like this. It wouldn’t do to lose him, not up here, not anywhere.

“Albus,” Scorpius whispers. His hair shines just as brightly as the stars around them, and his eyes are wide with wonder. “Do you see them?” 

Of course he does. He sees it all, even if his eyes are really only for the boy in front of him. Everything else is peripheral. And yet he still sees it all.

The surface beneath his feet is soft, like velvet, but it holds their weight. Perhaps he’s weightless, now, just another soft speck in the universe. Nothing but dust buried in starlight. Around him, the universe moves. He raises one hand and shifts, and the velvet floor moves with him, accommodating this soft speck with ideas and wonderings and musings above his station, indulging him in his curiosity. His hand goes through the moonlit mist in front of them.

The Star Whales aren’t quite solid. Vaguely connected, like sketched constellations made into motion, they seem to dance. Shining flecks of silver amongst the bruised hues of deep blue and indigo and violet - they dance around them. They’re gigantic, larger than life, like ships in the sky, silent and swimming in an ocean that he can’t see, can’t touch. 

Albus watches one rise up, spraying starlight over them. He can feel the invisible waves around him, crashing down against him, and with each collision he falls a little further, a little harder. Scorpius has eyes like the milky-way, and they watch in awe as the Star Whale sinks down again, half lost in its invisible ocean, its home, the place they’ve stumbled across. 

He’s not sure how they got here. He remembers a spell, a curse, perhaps, whispered in the hollows of the Great Hall, as they finished dinner. He thinks it was supposed to be playful, harmless. He doesn’t even think it was meant for them. 

He remembers looking up. He remembers clutching at Scorpius as the world fell away, as the sensation of floating filled his veins. Bubbles popped and fizzed in his blood. He remembers the walls turning to silk and shivering out of view, the bench slithering out from under him, and the way the stars seemed to fall serenely from the sky. Or maybe he rose up to meet them. 

He reaches out again, eager to feel something solid, present, _here._ The mist seems to mock him, this time. _Didn’t you learn your lesson?_

“I don’t think they’re real,” Albus says, withdrawing his hand with a shudder. 

“Maybe,” Scorpius whispers. “Or maybe it’s us - maybe we’re the ones that aren’t real. They’re beautiful, though, aren’t they?”

They are beautiful. Albus watches them swim further out into the bright darkness. He feels cool and warm at the same time, burning up in the presence of stars and suns, and yet cold with the knowledge that they shouldn’t be here.

Or maybe it’s just him, he thinks, as Scorpius steps forward. Maybe it’s just him that shouldn’t be here. Scorpius’s footsteps cast ripples over the dark nothing. He rattles the stars in his wake. Scorpius belongs among them, Albus thinks, this Star-Boy in a nebulous universe. It’s not just his name, it’s all that he is. 

“You do know where we are, don’t you?” Scorpius asks. He’s further away, now, and Albus almost lets him stay that way. But even if the inches of himself that he hates grow bigger by the day, he can’t bring himself to tear apart what he’s already built here. He should. He should let Scorpius go. He should let him find new friends, friends just as bright as him, but he can’t help but cling to the brightest thing he knows, even if he kills the light a little by always thinking such dark thoughts. 

“You’re doing it again,” Scorpius says, edging closer. Albus stays still, even as Scorpius reaches him, pressing a thumb to the crease between Albus’s eyebrows. 

“Doing what? What do my wrinkles have to do with anything?” 

Scorpius laughs, and Albus can see an ordinary boy, somehow, someone just like him, someone who’s moving closer and closer until there isn’t any space between them, despite how deeply entrenched in space they seem to be. 

“You’re thinking unkind things about yourself again. Your face gets all crinkled up.” 

Scorpius’s thumb shifts, tracking a path down Albus’s face, smoothing a groove into his skin that he hopes will be worn into place over time. 

“I wish you wouldn’t, you know,” Scorpius says, soft. “I quite like you un-crinkled.” 

Albus rolls his eyes, shakes his shoulders. There’s a weight inside him, an asteroid that’s smashed through his skin and settled in his stomach. 

“I can’t help what I think about myself.” 

“You can. I’ll help.” 

Albus takes the hand that’s stopped at his jaw and holds it, lowering it and not letting go. The Star Whales are almost gone, fading into the distance. 

“You already help,” Albus admits. Scorpius smiles, and he’s an ordinary boy, and he’s still made of star-stuff, and he’s not unreachable. Albus can touch him. His hand, when he threads their fingers together, doesn’t go through any sort of mist. 

“I was going to say something clever about where we are,” Scorpius says, casting another look at the heavens they stand in. “I think it’s more important to do this instead.” 

There really is no more space between them when they kiss. Albus has never had a kiss that tasted like the night sky before. He has never had a kiss that made the stars sigh quite like that. He had never had a kiss that made far-off planets quake, or one that brought down a storm of comets and a shower of shooting stars and a cascade of meteors. 

His whole world is this boy. He kisses Scorpius like it might not break them in the end, and he knows in his heart of hearts that it won’t. 

Behind them, the Star Whales start up a call. A chorus of song, the night sky made musical, the cries of a thousand triumphant constellations. Albus keeps kissing Scorpius. There’s no air up here, no need to breathe. 

Except they are, after all, astonishingly ordinary boys, made of star-stuff or not. There is a need to breathe, if only to keep doing that, to keep kissing each other. And Albus pulls back, gasping, as the Star Whales fill the galaxies with song. Scorpius is just as awed as he was when he first caught sight of them, except now he’s looking at Albus. 

“You were going to tell me where we were,” Albus reminds him, breathless. He blinks stardust out of his eyes. There’s a fog descending on him again, a floating feeling in his limbs. He clings, and Scorpius clings back. 

“We didn’t go anywhere, not really,” Scorpius says. “We just went up. The Great Hall really is quite great, you know.” 

“Oh,” Albus says, as the universe shifts beneath him. “We’re in the ceiling.” 

Scorpius grins, sheepish and young. “I’m glad I kissed you before I told you. Makes the whole thing seem more romantic, doesn’t it?” 

“I think it would have been a pretty damn good kiss, regardless,” Albus says. 

Scorpius laughs, and his hand tightens on Albus’s, and he can feel it all falling away and he doesn’t care, because this boy is his world, so it doesn’t quite matter if he goes back to the normal one they live in.

“Ready?” Scorpius asks. 

Albus laughs as the song of the star whales fades around him. He’s going to know that song, always. That song is the song of _them._

“Ready.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you! 
> 
>  
> 
> _“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.”_


End file.
